Yearly Archives: 2015

Looking at the top search trends of the year helps internet marketers, content creators, SEO professionals and webmasters understand how people use the internet. While these lists are typically dominated by celebrities, news events and sports moments, they nevertheless provide valuable insight and perspective for anyone hoping to attract more traffic to their site.

And while the importance of search engines may be diminishing slightly when compared to other methods of content delivery such as social media, these lists could help content creators find audiences in unexpected places (like Yahoo, for instance).

Apple's Swift programming language, debuted last year, has seen fairly wide use since its inception, counting LinkedIn, Yahoo Weather and Clear as apps that currently make use of it. Described as "Objective-C without the baggage of C" by one Apple software engineer, the new programming language has made app creation for iPhones, iPads and Mac computers significantly easier.

The tech giant has now opened up the programming language, allowing developers and programmers outside of Apple to dig into Swift, try it on different platforms, and contribute to its ongoing development.

On-page SEO is important in a number of ways. Not only do well-optimized site pages improve your chances of ranking highly in search results, but they typically tend to provide an improved user experience as well. With so many on-page SEO factors to consider (meta information, links, URL structure, just to name a few), it's very easy to overlook some simple yet beneficial practices that could enhance your site's presence and usability.

According to a new study from popular SEO tool Raven, there are five clear standouts when it comes to the most widespread on-page SEO issues.

Sharing videos on social media is incredibly popular, and Facebook now gets around four billion video views every day. For marketers, video is one of the most effective and popular techniques for bringing attention to a product or service on the Internet.

Of course, many marketers host their companies' videos on a YouTube channel and share or embed them from there. While other streaming video sites like Vimeo have tried to compete with YouTube, none (except possibly Vine) have succeeded. Now, however, a new Facebook video service could finally challenge the video giant.

Last week, it was reported that Instagram now has a community of over 400 million active users, which makes it officially more popular than Twitter. This is just the latest in a string of not-so-great news for the network: its value has plummeted since its IPO in 2013, its growth has flatlined, and many of its new users are quick to abandon it.

In an effort to combat all this, Twitter has revealed some new features such as Moments, which will make users' timelines more organized and easy to understand. For content creators and marketers, however, the most important change involves the famous 140-character limit.